Best way to combine hard
liquor and beer: The Bourbon Stoney Stout, aged in bourbon
barrels, by Anning and Laura Smith at the Shenandoah Brewing Co.

Best volleyball court: It's a little overgrown,
but the field behind the Bardo Brewery in Amissville is a great place to
drink beer and swat a ball over a net.

Best
mountain view: The Deep Creek Brewery doesn't have a great view
of its namesake lake, but the view from the deck of the ski resort is
wonderful.

Best renovated interior: The
old bank that Gordon Biersch made over has never looked better.

Most worth a drive: Brewer's
Alley in old town Frederick is in a beautiful 120-year-old building and
does everything well, from pilsners to stouts to grilled fish to
pizza.

Friendliest staff: Both Sweetwater
Taverns have friendly and knowledgeable servers and bartenders. Easily
the best crews I've come across.

Best
appetizers: Smoked salmon with cheese bread toasts and the
southwestern egg rolls at the Merrifield Sweetwater Tavern. Order them
with a glass of Snake River Pale Ale.

Best
burger: District ChopHouse serves 'em up big and juicy, and
they go well with a Nut Brown Ale.

-- Eric
Brace

I'm playing hardball reporter with Nick Funnell. I want him to name
names. Tell the truth. No coy evasions: Whose beer does he like
to drink?

Funnell is the brewmaster of Sweetwater Tavern
in Merrifield, Va., and I won't let him name himself, even
though he does make some truly fine beers. "Honestly?" he asks. Please.
"I can walk into any brewpub in the region and find a great beer. The
level of beermaking in the Washington area is really, really
high."

This might seem like simple diplomacy, but I let him slide
because he is in fact telling the truth.

Nearly five years ago, in
these very pages, I checked out the local brewpub and craft brewing
scene and came away with a mixed taste in my mouth -- literally. Some of
the brews were fine, some superb, but too many were just dull, dull,
dull. So dull that a cold Miller Light would have been better.

Now
that there are even more brewpubs in the area, you might expect the
quality to have gone down, but oddly, the beer-making has clearly
stepped up a notch. And nearly everyone I talk to points to one man as
the reason the Washington beer scene keeps improving: Jerry
Bailey.

Bailey founded the Old Dominion Brewing
Company in Ashburn in 1990. He remembers a speech he gave soon
thereafter to a brewers association meeting in Texas. "It was about
marketing with no money, and how I'd managed to do that," he says. "So I
gave them my '10 Principles' and the first seven were 'Good beer.' " He
chuckles, realizing how corny it sounds. "I was being cute for a speech,
of course, but in many ways that's all there is to it."

He makes
it sound easy, but maintaining a consistently high level of quality is
the hardest thing about making beer, and something Bailey has been
remarkably successful at. He has developed a distribution system for the
Washington area that ensures fresh bottles of beer in stores and in the
restaurants that buy his kegs. He was a pioneer craft brewer in the
area, and set the bar very high.

As the godfather of the local
brewing scene, Bailey hosts the Old Dominion Beer Festival every summer,
inviting brewers from all over the Mid-Atlantic to come tout their beer.
He imports the two-liter glass bottles known as growlers (which almost
all brewpubs except those in the District allow patrons to fill and take
home) from Germany and sells them to most of the brewpubs in the area at
cost. His phone line is an informal advice conduit on sources of hops,
grain and machinery. "The primary goal is for people to be able to get
good beer," he says. "Once people get used to drinking good beer, then
they won't accept bad beer."

By focusing on the common goal of
brewing good beer, Bailey says area brewers work together, rather than
against one another. "There's no nastiness within the crowd of brewers,"
he says. "No one's trying to outdo a brewery in Frederick or make sure
the Baltimore Brewing Company doesn't do well, and
that's an unusual thing among small brewers. There's a real esprit de
corps that allows us all to work on the general issue of good, local,
fresh beer."

Gone are the Blue-N-Gold
Brewing Co., the Mount Airy Brewing Co. and
the Bethesda branch of the Capitol City Brewing Co. In Gaithersburg, the
Old Town Tavern & Brewing Co. has become
Summit Station, and in Arlington, Bardo
Rodeo packed up and moved its brewery to Rappahannock
County.

Both the Shenandoah Brewing Co. and the
Old Dominion Brewery have added brewpubs within their breweries, and
Sweetwater will open another tavern in Sterling next month.

BEER
AND BOURBON

At Shenandoah, a tiny operation in Alexandria's
industrial neighborhood, I brewed a batch of my own beer while, uh,
researching that last big story. This time around I'm only visiting,
sitting at the small bar, watching employees clean the fermenting tanks
after some folks have brewed their own.

Owners Anning and Laura
Smith, the husband and wife team that opened the brew-your-own business
in early 1996, know that cleanliness is the key to good beer ("You don't
want any random bacteria getting in and messing with the yeast," Anning
says). Heavy rubber gloves are propped on the handle of each cleaned
tank, looking like a row of upraised hands, a remarkable class where
every student is waiting to be picked by the teacher.

I order the
Mexican Brewers Chili, chunks of beef cooked with the Stoney Man Stout.
It comes from a plastic tub in a little reach-in fridge. It gets
microwaved and put in front of me, steaming in its bowl. I like the
informal atmosphere of Shenandoah. There are clipboards lying around,
bags of barley and hops.

The chili is good, with a nice beer tang.
I wolf it down accompanied by chugs of a six-beer sampler. The Stoney
Man Stout, as you'd guess, goes great with the chili. Of the others, the
only one that really impresses me is the Big Meadows Pale Ale. It turns
out that it was developed for the Big Meadows Lodge in the Shenandoah
National Park. On a lark, Anning took some beer out to the lodge, hoping
the name of his brewery would spark some interest. It worked, and he
created the Big Meadows Pale Ale just for the lodge of the same name. It
now accounts for 40 percent of the beer sales in the hotel's Tap
Room.

Not among my six beers is something I see listed on the
chalkboard, Bourbon Stoney Stout. I get a glass, sip it, and it
immediately becomes one of my all-time favorites. Already a big bourbon
fan, I'm floored by this combination of flavors. It's the stout, but
stout that's been allowed to age in an oak cask that previously held
Bowman's bourbon. Wow. This is amazing.

Another Shenandoah beer
worth tasting is the Firkins Cask Conditioned Ale, which gets tapped
every Thursday and generally lasts through Saturday. This is one of
several cask conditioned ales being offered at brewpubs throughout the
area. An acquired taste, these beers are made by not removing the yeast
after a primary fermentation, and allowing a secondary fermentation to
take place after it's transferred to a small wooden cask. It's poured
straight from the cask at room temperature, and has a very soft
carbonation, along with plenty of live yeast.

In 1997, Shenandoah
got an "off-license," so you can take its beers home with you. A
six-pack of the Bourbon Stout is 10 bucks. A bargain, I swear. The food
is limited to chilies and a meatball sandwich, and the beers are limited
to whatever's in stock. And even though the ambience is industrial strip
modern, the flavors of what you'll find here are worth the
trip.

In another industrial strip, this one in Ashburn, the Old
Dominion Brewery is in the process of knocking down walls and
rebuilding a kitchen to increase the size of its brewpub. "We're adding
about 72 seats to the 110 we already have," Bailey says. "We're bringing
in a new chef, David Gedney, next month. He was the chef at the Ashby
Inn for several years, and has worked at the Inn at Little Washington
and at Nora's, so we're really raising the level of the
food."

Good thing, because though the beer-marinated rib-eye I
have is pretty good, neither it nor the soggy fish and chips are as
tasty as the beer that accompanies them. "We hope to really integrate
the food with the beer," says OD General Manager Terry Fife. "We'll host
special tastings and beer-oriented dinners. We've got big
plans."

If the new menu has food as good as the Bourbon Stout
(yep, Old Dominion has one too), the Summer Wheat ale or the Tuppers'
Hop Pocket Pils lager that I taste, then Ashburn will definitely be a
more frequent destination of mine. You should try it too, especially on
weekends, when tours of the impressive facility are
offered.

LAGER LESSONS

The most recent addition to the
beer scene downtown, Gordon Biersch has carved out a niche by offering
only lagers and no ales (which is why when a friend recently asked for a
black-and-tan, the bartender demurred, having neither the stout ale nor
the pale ale required for the mixture). Lager means "to store" in
German, and refers to the fact that lagers take much longer to brew.
It's the main reason there aren't many lagers on most brewpubs' list of
beers.

The distinction between a lager and an ale is based mainly
on the different yeasts used during fermentation. A lager yeast doesn't
give you the fruity and buttery tastes you sometimes find in ales. Done
right, a lager will generally have a dominant flavor of the malted grain
(mainly barley that's been allowed to germinate and which is then dried
and roasted) and then the hops (the dried flowers of the humulus
lupulus vine, which are added for both their resiny bitterness and
their floral perfume).

Gordon Biersch is a chain founded by
brewmaster Dan Gordon and restaurateur Dean Biersch in Palo Alto,
Calif., in 1988. They've expanded all over the country and finally hit
Washington earlier this year. All their restaurants offer the same four
beers: Pilsner, Golden Export, Märzen and Blonde Bock, as well as a
seasonal special.

When I visit the striking restaurant at the
corner of Ninth and F streets NW, the renovated bank lobby with its tall
arched windows has me predisposed to like the place. A bartender lines
up four glasses as a sampler, explaining each one. The Golden Export is
the most successful -- light and dry with nice flavor -- but all the
lagers lack body I find. The food is mostly well prepared (a halibut
sandwich is good, as is the salad with seared tuna), if a little salty.
The fried artichokes are almost lost in batter, and the recommended
garlic fries are soggy and generally seem a bad idea. More beer
please.

The Philadelphia-based company John Harvard opened its
Brew House in the basement of the Warner Theatre building at 13th and E
streets in mid-1997. Brewer Mark Kaufman rotates among some 35 beer
recipes, adding many of his own to the ones sent down from corporate
headquarters.

Heading downstairs, you're greeted by stained glass
versions of Teddy Roosevelt and John Kennedy in saintly garb. The
message is lost on me, but I'm here for beer, not politico-religious
healing. Paul the bartender is affable during one happy hour visit.
"Sure, we have a sampler," he answers, between greeting several parties
of incoming guests by name. "It's $4.95 for five, but it's my choice."
He glares at me as if I'll argue. I don't. "But I choose well," he says
with a reassuring nod.

I like the thick-headed, not-too-bitter
stout (it goes well with the sausage made of chicken and wild mushrooms)
and the Hefeweizen, whose buttery citrus taste goes well with the rich
seafood soup. The All-American Light Lager is too light, and oddly
slippery. (Beer aficionados talk about a brew's "mouthfeel," an awkward
word, but this lager makes me want to complain to someone about its
mouthfeel.) The Nut Brown Ale has a good roasted malt flavor and a
really nice mouthfeel, while the District Pale Ale is crisp and hoppy.
Thumbs up.

Corporate recipes are anathema to Barnaby Struve, head
brewer at the Rock Bottom Brewery in Arlington, part of a national
Colorado-based chain that also owns the District ChopHouse. "Please,
please write this," he begs. "Even though we might look the same as
other Rock Bottoms, and we share a logo and have similar themes and
menus, every single beer we serve is completely up to the brewer working
there. We're not the McDonald's of breweries."

Struve worked for a Rock Bottom in Chicago before coming to
Washington and finds things more to his liking here, echoing Jerry
Bailey's words with his own. "This is a really, really good scene here,
as far as brewing goes," he says. "Chicago was a harsh scene between
brewers for some reason, but this area is a great place to be making
beer. Nick [Funnell] is great out at Sweetwater, Bardo makes some
excellent beers, and Old Dominion of course keeps making great beers. I
love it here."

Struve's Radio Tower Red and his Shropshire Cask
Conditioned Ale were both gold medal winners at the 2001 Real Ale
Festival in Chicago. His Spout Run Porter is smoky, slightly sweet and
his Mother Martha's Light Lager is indeed light, with a little bit of
flowery hop taste, and is very good cold. The Heffe Wheat suffers a bit
too much from the bubble gum/banana flavor of the yeast but has nice
body, and the American Dream Ale is very smooth.

The Capitol City
chain gives its brewers leeway as well, says Bill Madden, head brewer of
the Arlington restaurant. "This company really lets us exercise our
artistic license," he says. "I've been on a Belgian kick lately, with
some triple bocks, but I'm proudest of our Kolsch here." Kolsch is a
very light blend of ale and lager yeasts that's become very popular in
brewpubs, and I've seen it everywhere during my research, but none has
been as good as Madden's.

He also has the tank space to brew a
time-consuming lager when the urge hits him, and he promises that the
Oktoberfest lager he brewed last month -- and which won't be tapped
until its namesake month -- will be well worth the wait. "Come for the
Oktoberfest street fair here in Shirlington on Oct. 6," he insists. "We
close off the street, thousands of people come, there's a German Oom-Pah
band. It's great."

Unfortunately, Madden's beers are not well
served by the "front of the house," as it's called in the restaurant
business. I've found dirty bar tops, indifferent bartenders, missing
waitresses and surly busboys to be all-too-common in this location, and
the customers deserve better.

The Capitol City on New York Avenue
NW is in better shape than its Arlington counterpart, and the beers
there have improved noticeably in the past five years. A sampler of four
proves that the Capitol Kolsch -- from brewers Chris Frashier and Chris
Firey -- is almost the match of Madden's, and the Prohibition Porter is
rich with a touch of sweetness. Both ales I have are crisp, cold and
good, especially in the middle of a 100-degree day.

A hot day is
also the excuse to take a long drive to the hills west. In Rappahannock
County, I stop by the Bardo Brewery. Formerly based in Arlington, Bardo
is set on a hillside and lets you buy kegs and growlers if you visit,
but you can't buy a pint. Due to licensing idiosyncrasies, owner Bill
Stewart has to give away -- not sell -- "samples" on premises. So if you
make the drive out there, there's a free beer awaiting you. If you don't
want to go that far, you can pay for Bardo beers on tap at Dr. Dremo's
in the old Bardo location in Arlington (Bardo beers are also available
at Medaterra restaurant in Washington and Tim's River Shore Restaurant
in Dumfries).

Steering north and west, I head to Deep Creek Lake
to taste the offerings of one of Maryland's newest brewpubs, the Deep
Creek Brewing Company. Perched on the north end of the lake, it opened
two years ago with the promise of bringing great beer to western
Maryland. It's a promise that hasn't yet been met, but there are reasons
for optimism.

The Youghiogheny Red has an interesting campfire
taste of burnt wood, not necessarily unpleasant and the Four Beary Wheat
is crisp with some light sweetness. Gooch's Wee Never Left
Scottish-style brown ale also has that burnt wood taste, but isn't bad.
Both pale ales are lifeless and soapy (problems with the dishwasher?)
and the Big Bear Stout had body but not much flavor. The food -- from
the stews to the grilled fish to the salads -- needs attention across
the board. The view from the deck of the Wisp ski area and the sparkle
of the nearby lake almost mitigates my complaints.

Across Maryland
I intrepidly trek, finding a delicious Dunkel Weizen and Hefeweizen at
Frederick's stellar brewpub, Brewer's Alley. Formerly Frederick's City
Hall, the 19th century brick building is lovely, and the food and drink
offerings are up to their surroundings. The Pils and the IPA are also
first-class and the sampler rack complements well one of the best
vegetable pizzas I've ever had. There's a huge menu to choose from, and
you should ask your server about ideal food-beer pairings, because this
is one of the few places I've found that seems to do everything
well.

At Summit Station in Gaithersburg (managed -- but not owned
-- by the same folks that manage Brewer's Alley) I find the only fruit
beer of my recent explorations. It's a Blueberry Ale, and while it
smells too strongly of blueberry pancake mix, the flavor is subtle and
clean. To my surprise, I like it. The Nut Brown Ale is smoky and good,
and both pale ales are distinctive, with pine and cinnamon flavors
coming subtly from the hops. Don't miss the Kolsch here either. Made by
Joe Kalish, it gives Bill Madden's a run for his money.

Summit
Station is also a beautiful setting for a brewpub, more than 100 years
old, the pub is separated into a bar, a restaurant and an upstairs
nightclub, where live music is frequently heard and there's a nice open
air deck overlooking downtown Gaithersburg. Good food, good beer, good
music. Go.

In Ellicott City, I find the lager-centric Ellicott
Mills Brewing Company, where I sample the eight on tap, and really only
like the non-lager of the bunch. It's the Weizenheimer Wheat, and it has
a cool pear flavor that's not too heavy. The others seem oddly
unbalanced: a too-sweet doppelbock, a salty pilsner, a dunkel with body
and no taste.

But there's help on the way next month in the person
of Jason Oliver, who recently left the Virginia Beverage Co., Old Town
Alexandria's only brewpub, to sign on at Ellicott Mills. An excellent
brewer, Oliver makes superb Dark Rider Oatmeal Stout, Governor's IPA and
Scottish-style Wee Dram that could always make me overcome my aversion
to the VBC's cramped layout. Where Oliver's departure leaves VBC remains
to be seen as it hasn't announced his successor yet, and for now they're
still pouring Oliver's beer.

On the commercial strip just north of
Ellicott City, I wasn't expecting to be impressed by what the Bare Bones
Grill & Brewery had to offer, but Brendan Fleming clearly knows how
to make beer. The Irish-style Timber River Red was one of the best red
ales I've tasted, and the Savage Mill Porter had great body beefed up by
hints of sassafras. The menu is extensive, and while the setting of a
strip mall brass-railing restaurant isn't my favorite, the beers, all
served cold but still revealing lots of flavor, are truly worth a
visit.

Just down Route 29 from Ellicott City, in Columbia, sits
the Rocky Run Tap & Grill. The height of suburban tackiness with
more beer signs of more different brands than I've ever seen in one
place, Rocky Run wins me over with the simplest of ploys: a giant barrel
of roasted peanuts, and a wood floor for you to throw the shells
on.

The bar area is loaded with televisions turned to sporting
events, and no one bugs you when you sit there with peanuts and a beer
sampler that holds a nice surprise in the form of an excellent stout,
with molasses underpinnings. There's also a very decent pale ale,
though the red and the gold ales are nondescript.

In Annapolis,
the Fordham Brewery in the Ram's Head Tavern makes a nice hoppy Helles
lager, and both the filtered and unfiltered versions of the Copperhead
Ale have a lot of body with some malty sweetness. Sitting on the back
patio under the enormous wisteria vine on a sunny afternoon is the way
to properly enjoy these brews. Unfortunately, the Wisteria Wheat is too
buttery and sweet with no edge. Such a lovely plant, such a dull
beer.

In addition to having the patio, beers and well-prepared
food, the Ram's Head is one of the Mid-Atlantic's finest showcase clubs
for live music. Make a road trip of it: Go for an early dinner, catch
the sunset down on the waterfront, then catch a show.

SEEING HOW
IT'S DONE

Back in Virginia, I spend half a day getting in Nick Funnell's way
at the Merrifield Sweetwater Tavern. I want to see how he does what he
does. What does he do? As a friend put it: "He makes the only sampler
I've tried where I like every beer." I agree. It's clear that Funnell is
a master, and I've hounded him to walk me through the process.

I'm
hoping we'll make some of his Giddyup Stout, one of the all-time great
brews, made with several pounds of coffee beans added to the grain. Or
maybe his eyebrow-raising High Desert Stout, a gold medal winner at this
year's Real Ale Festival. But today the brewing schedule is such that
we're making the Sweetwater Light ale. The light ale is one of the most
popular offerings, and Funnell explains that it might be the hardest to
make.

"Because it has such a light flavor, any imperfections in
the yeast or any of the ingredients will jump out at you," he says. "You
have to be very, very careful because you can't hide your mistakes under
lots of flavors the way you might be able to with a
stout."

Funnell is British, with a chemistry degree from Leeds
University. He plunged into beermaking because it was the most
interesting thing he could think of doing with his degree. "I suppose I
could have developed paint colors for a paint company," he says, "but I
loved beer." Throughout the day, he waxes nearly poetic about
beermaking, and it's clear that his talent is driven by passion for his
creations.

He walks me through milling the barley malt, creating
the "liquor," a kind of grain tea made by mixing the milled grain with
mineralized water. Then there's the boiling, the adding of the hops, the
filtering, the adding of the yeast, the pumping from one tank to the
next. I learn about cask ales, about ice beers, about specific gravity
to measure sugar content, about carbon dioxide buildup.

I learn
that the four basic ingredients that go into making beer -- barley,
hops, water and yeast -- can be combined in an infinite number of ways.
I learn that a farmer comes every week to haul away the spent grain to
feed his cows. I learn a zillion facts about brewing that I've forgotten
by the end of the lesson.

Toward the end of the session, after the
hopped up "liquor" has been sent into the tank where a batch of bubbling
yeast pounces on all the sugar and starts the fermenting process,
Funnell turns to me with a grin.

"You reckon it's time for some
quality control?"

I nod, not really knowing what he
means.

We head from the brewery section of Sweetwater and out to
the bar, a bustling circle in the middle of a bustling dining room,
alive with a late lunch crowd. Funnell glides behind the bar and pulls
some taps, setting several glasses in front of me, filled with beautiful
liquids ranging from the pale gold of the Sweetwater Light to the deep
brown of his award-winning stout.